Paul Beakley​ sorry. Sorry sorry sorry. I was clearly projecting my experience, in retrospect.

Speaking of doing bad things at the table: im italian, and I’m writing a game about organised crime. For obvious reasons I’m quite sensitised to the topic, as were the playtesters (mostly Italian expats, a bunch of them from the deep south).

It actually took me years of brooding about it before I started writing the thing. Because it’s about real stuff and real people (not directly, as we played a fantasy renaissance version of it, but organized crime dynamics work very well everywhere). And we had great fun.

But I remember playing wargames, or rpgs, and being told off for feticising violence by people that routinely enjoy watching fictional violence. I never heard before the “too personal, too real” perspective and, well, yeah, it’s a totally legitimate and 0% hypocritical point of view that also happen to be helpfully insightful.

Got me thinking about designing in that space.